Stacy Galina’s Happy “Landing”

Stacy Galina laughs, “Actors are like jilted lovers – they’re the last to know.”

The 25-year old actress who plays Kate on Knots Landing says, yes, “there were rumors the prime-time-soap was stopping production for retooling, but that was it.

She got the call at home last month and hasn’t been back on the set since. Though new episodes of CBS’ Knots are airing, including tonights at 10 EST/PST, the latter part of the season is being reworked.

With production on hold, Galina says, “We have an extended Christmas vacation.”

She joined the show three years ago. At the time, she didn’t know Knots from Dallas. “I was so stupid,” she laughs. ‘Then she landed the job of Mary Frances Sumner, William Devane’s daughter, but was killed off after one episode. She made some appearances on the show Paradise and shot a pilot that never became a series. Then Knots called her back for a new role, as Greg Sumner’s niece.

” ‘We’ll put this hideous red wig on ad bring you back,’ ” she was told. “I wasn’t too happy with the red hair, but there wasn’t anything else to do.”

Galina is on the last year of her Knots contract after a winding road to Hollywood.

The baltimore-born, Georgia-reared ballet dancer has undergone numerous foot operations for a bone ailment she’s had since childhood. After dancing for Mikhail Baryshnikov in New York and then spending time in a wheelchair, she realized she wouldn’t be able to dance for a living and that she’d be wearing birkenstocks for the rest of her life. She wound up back in atlanta, doing commercials.

She auditioned five times for Robert De Niro and Sergio Leone when they were castind 1984’s Once Upon a Time in America. “I told my mom and she said, “Who’s Robert De Niro?” Galina remembers.

She didnt get the part, but a Miss Hollywood contest took her to Los Angeles. “It was strange to do,” she admits.

Her first impression of L.A.? “I thought it was a big nuthouse. I thought everyone was crazy. But I think that now.”